Divided Highways

Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life

Tom Lewis

• Éditeur: Cornell University Press
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780801467820
• Édition: 2
• Sujet: Histoire
• Sous-sujet: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

"Anyone who has ever driven on a U.S. interstate highway or eaten at an exit-ramp McDonald's will come away from this book with a better understanding of what makes modern America what it is." – Chicago Tribune

"A fascinating work... with a subject central to contemporary life but to which few, if any, have devoted so much thoughtful analysis and good humor." – Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Divided Highways is the best and most important book yet published about how asphalt and concrete have changed the United States. Quite simply, the Interstate Highway System is the longest and largest engineered structure in the history of the world, and it has enormously influenced every aspect of American life. Tom Lewis is an engaging prose stylist with a gift for the telling anecdote and appropriate example."—Kenneth T. Jackson, Harvard Design Magazine

"Lewis provides a comprehensive and balanced examination of America's century-long infatuation with the automobile and the insatiable demands for more and better road systems. He has written a sprightly and richly documented book on a vital subject."—Richard O. Davies, Journal of American History

"Lewis describes in a convincing, lively, and well-documented narrative the evolution of America's roadway system from one of the world's worst road networks to its best."—John Pucher, Journal of the American Planning Association

"This brightly written history of the U.S. federal highway program is like the annual report of a successful company that has had grim second thoughts. The first half recounts progress made, while the second suggests that the good news is not quite what it seems."—Publishers Weekly

"Lewis is a very talented and engaging writer, and the tale he tells—the vision for the Interstates, Congressional battles, construction, and the impact of new highways on American life—is important to understanding the shape of the contemporary American landscape."—David Schuyler, Arthur and Katherine Shadek Professor of the Humanities and American Studies at Franklin & Marshall College, author of Sanctified Landscape: Writers, Artists, and the Hudson River Valley, 1820–1909 In Divided Highways, Tom Lewis offers an encompassing account of highway development in the United States. In the early twentieth century Congress created the Bureau of Public Roads to improve roads and the lives of rural Americans. The Bureau was the forerunner of the Interstate Highway System of 1956, which promoted a technocratic approach to modern road building sometimes at the expense of individual lives, regional characteristics, and the landscape. With thoughtful analysis and engaging prose Lewis charts the development of the Interstate system, including the demographic and economic pressures that influenced its planning and construction and the disputes that pitted individuals and local communities against engineers and federal administrators. This is a story of America's hopes for its future life and the realities of its present condition.

Originally published in 1997, this book is an engaging history of the people and policies that profoundly transformed the American landscape—and the daily lives of Americans. In this updated edition of Divided Highways, Lewis brings his story of the Interstate system up to date, concluding with Boston's troubled and yet triumphant Big Dig project, the growing antipathy for big federal infrastructure projects, and the uncertain economics of highway projects both present and future.

1

THE CHIEF

The Lord put roads for travelling: why He laid them down flat on the earth. When he aims for something to be always a-moving, He makes it long ways, like a road or a horse or a Wagon, but when He aims for something to stay put, He makes it up-and-down ways, like a tree or a man.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

The National Road in the Allegheny Mountains west of Cumberland, Maryland, on a spring day in the early 1920s. Leo J. Beachy, a self-taught photographer crippled by multiple sclerosis, has been transported to the site on Negro Mountain by his sister. She has helped him to set up his camera and record scenes of the road and its travelers. Beachy flags down a touring car as it crests the hill. The seven passengers—two families, perhaps—get out, stretch, and pose. The women are dressed in coats and hats, which help to keep off the dust. The men appear to take a proprietary interest in the car. One leans his left foot on the running board, cocking his right arm on his hip, while the other rests his hand on the roof support. The shutter opens and closes; in an instant a glass plate preserves the moment.

More than merely capturing a party of travelers, perhaps on a Sunday outing through the Alleghenies, Beachy’s camera has recorded a moment in America’s landscape and culture. The automobile is shiny, with just a few traces of mud at the tips of the fenders. Its split windshield is open slightly to let in the breeze. There is no danger that any sharp rocks on the road will cause the solid rubber tires to go flat.

Beachy seems to have been as interested in the road as he was in those who traveled upon it. The photographer preferred to call the National Road the “ocean to ocean highway,” and he visited it often. At this point on Negro Mountain, the road seems to stretch into an endless series of hills and dips beyond. Its surface is compacted stone that at the shoulders has broken into mud. The grades of the roadway are short and steep, enough to tax a team and a wagon or an early automobile. Telephone and electric poles encroach from the sides, and the very woods themselves seem to threaten safe passage. Nevertheless, the road points the way through the wilderness and represents a first step in taming it. In time, as the speed and traffic of automobiles increase, work crews will widen it and level some of the hills and dips.

By the 1920s, parties like this one were a common sight. Their dress tells us that they are neither migrants nor settlers, but are traveling for the pleasure of making an afternoon social call, or just to see the countryside—as much as they could through the dense woods—or for the pure enjoyment of moving. There were nearly eight million automobiles across the United States in 1920, about one for every four families. They had access to about 369,000 miles of roads, most with surfaces in worse condition than the National Road. More than a horse and wagon or a railroad car of the nineteenth century, the road and the automobile best suited what Alexis de Tocqueville called the “restless temper” of Americans. “O to realize space!” Walt Whitman wrote in the nineteenth century. Roads and cars were enabling Americans of the twentieth century to realize the full import of Whitman’s thought: “The plenteousness of all—that there are no bounds.”

The growth of the automobile brought another important change to the National Road. In 1926, it officially became part of U.S. Route 40, a federally supported road and major east-west thoroughfare. The route began at Atlantic City in New Jersey and crossed the Atlantic states of Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania; touched the tip of West Virginia at Wheeling; passed into the midwestern states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas; and traversed the western states of Colorado, Utah, and Nevada before stopping at the corner of Harrison and Tenth streets in downtown San Francisco, California. The change of the National Road into a federal highway was a simple but profound one. Though the road followed the same route, it was now part of a larger web of federal “interstate” routes. The narrow passage through the Alleghenies in Maryland was now linked to the nation.

The man who created the interstate routes did as much as Henry Ford or Alfred Sloan to put America on wheels. He funneled billions of federal dollars to the forty-eight states to build roads. His momentous decisions transformed the American landscape and affected the daily lives and movements of almost every citizen. Yet few in America in 1926 knew his name or even his office; today, almost no one does. He was Thomas Harris MacDonald, chief of the Federal Bureau of Public Roads.

Small wonder that Thomas Harris MacDonald was unknown, for he rarely courted publicity. Photographs of him show a man of complete formality and propriety. His five-foot-seven-inch thickset frame always appears perfectly erect. His dark suit jacket—usually single-breasted—is buttoned neatly over a vest and dark tie. His hands always hang tensely at his side, while his eyes stare directly and intensely into the lens. His round face, marked by taut lips, a high forehead, and thinning hair, looks imposing and cold.

The actual man was little different. Thomas Harris MacDonald wore a coat and tie even when fishing or horseback riding on vacation in Nebraska. Colleagues and subordinates described him as reserved, austere, dignified, and cool, and often spoke of the severe stare of his cobalt-blue eyes. “When you were in Mr. MacDonald’s presence you were quiet. You spoke only if he asked you to,” one subordinate remembered. “He came as close…to characterize what I would call royalty.” Subordinates, colleagues, and his closest associates always addressed him as “Mr. MacDonald” or “Chief”—never “Thomas” or “Tom.” To his wife, even in the private intimacy of their home, he was always “Mr. MacDonald.” In accordance with a demand he had made in his youth, his brother and sisters called him “Sir.”

Little of the place where MacDonald spent his childhood suggested romance, despite its exotic labeling. Pioneers had enthusiastically named the spot about fifty miles east of Des Moines, Iowa, after Montezuma, a place of victory in the recent war with Mexico and, originally, a fabled sixteenth-century Aztec emperor. The soil—far richer than could be found in New England or the Northwest Territory—lured the first settlers to the south-central part of what became Poweshiek County with the promise of great harvests, much as Cortes had been drawn to the Aztecs by the promise of gold. After the Civil War, the Rock Island and Missouri and St. Louis railroads established branch lines to the town, the first reliable connections its twelve hundred citizens had with the rest of the state.

For up to a third of the year Montezuma was isolated by mud. The same thick soil that yielded the abundant harvest of crops became a giant quagmire whenever it rained. Iowa natives regarded their state’s mud with the same respect and dread one might accord some uncontrollable primeval force. It swallowed horses up to their knees and wagon wheels up to their hubs. “It had the consistency of thick and sticky horse glue,” MacDonald’s daughter remembered. “When it rained, you were stuck, your wagons, your feet, you just stayed in your house until it dried. That could be two, three weeks, a month.” Though twenty-seven railway companies with nearly ten thousand miles of track crisscrossed the state, and few farms were more than six or eight miles from a depot, rain made travel to the station impossible. As a boy living with his brother and two sisters in Montezuma and working in his father’s lumber and grain store, MacDonald saw firsthand how farmers struggled with the roads and how the town’s commerce came to a standstill whenever it rained.

In 1900, when he turned nineteen, MacDonald announced that he would attend the Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in Ames. He intended, he said, to become a civil engineer. There was little doubt about his commitment. Years later the family remembered his expression was assured; his will was implacable.

The foresight of a conservative Republican congressman who had quit school at age fifteen enabled Thomas MacDonald and thousands like him to attend college. In 1862, Representative Justin Smith Morrill of Vermont introduced a bill granting public lands in each state for the “endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college…to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts.” The Senate approved the measure, and President Lincoln signed the Morrill Land Grant Act into law. In 1890, Congress passed a second Morrill Act (the octogenarian Vermonter, now serving in the Senate, knew nothing of term limits). It provided money to colleges and universities, the first federal aid for education.

As a result of Morrill’s act, western American states in the closing years of the nineteenth century blossomed with agricultural and technical colleges. They were past due. Prior to 1862, there were just six schools of engineering in the United States—including those at the military academy at West Point, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Harvard, Yale, and MIT. By 1872, there were seventy, most in land-grant colleges, opening opportunities for people like Thomas MacDonald, who likely would not have ever considered attending a traditional college or university. Armed with a practical degree, many went on to careers in American industry, producing petroleum, steel, and of course automobiles. Still others built modern America’s great civil engineering works—its bridges, skyscrapers, subways, tunnels, and roads.

The Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts at Ames, established in 1868, testified to Justin Smith Morrill’s vision. While the college stressed the mechanic arts, it also took care to include the “other scientific and classical studies,” as stipulated by the Land Grant Act. In addition to physics, chemistry, mathematics, and civil engineering, (twenty-nine courses), the curriculum also demanded four terms of English and two each of Latin, military science, and library. MacDonald’s grades hovered about 3.85 on a 4-point scale, more than enough to qualify him for honors.

At Iowa State, MacDonald fell under the tutelage of the school’s dean, Anson Marston, who taught courses in road building and was an early and important advocate of the “good roads” movement. At the turn of the century the term “good roads” was a prevailing theme among travelers. It had been popularized by a manufacturer of shoe forms and Union veteran of the Civil War, Colonel Albert Augustus Pope, who introduced a “safety bicycle” in 1878. Pope’s machine made bicycling the rage. Sedentary town men, and later women, joined together to tour the countryside on weekend afternoons. By 1900, more than three hundred companies were producing over a million bicycles a year.

Pope did not stop with manufacturing but turned his attention to the road conditions bicyclists had to endure. “American roads are among the worst in the civilized world, and always have been,” he wrote in a pamphlet entitled Highway Improvement. “I hope to live to see the time when all over our land, our cities, towns, and villages shall be connected by as good roads as can be found.” Pope organized riders into an early lobbying group, the League of American Wheelmen, financed courses in road engineering at MIT, and built a short stretch of macadam road in Boston to show people how wonderful a smooth pavement could be. He helped persuade the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to create a highway commission. By the turn of the century, the “good roads” movement was sweeping the country.

The League of American Wheelmen became the first highway lobby group that served as a model for others to follow. Through its own publication, Good Roads, the league supported “good roads” associations across the country; it held “good roads” conventions and argued ceaselessly before state legislatures for road improvements. In New Jersey in 1891, it lobbied the legislature to pass the first state aid bill for road construction in the nation. In the next quarter century all other states followed New Jersey’s progressive thinking.

The League of American Wheelmen joined with Pope to persuade J. Sterling Morton, President Cleveland’s Secretary of Agriculture, to create in 1893 an Office of Road Inquiry to “furnish information” about road building. The office began modestly by publishing pamphlets on road building, but within four years it furnished information in the form of “object lesson roads,” short sections of well-constructed pavement. After completing a section, the office held a “Good Roads Day” and invited farmers from around the country to see for themselves what travel could be like.

Recognizing his pupil’s ability, Dean Marston encouraged MacDonald to write his senior thesis on the highway needs of Iowa farmers and the horsepower necessary to pull heavy loads over highways. MacDonald’s graduation in 1904 fortuitously coincided with the state legislature’s appropriation of $3,500 to Iowa State College for a highway commission to study the state’s roads. It fell to Anson Marston to hire a chief engineer at $1,000 a year. Though he toured eastern engineering schools in search of a likely candidate, Marston turned to MacDonald as the only person who understood Iowa’s conditions, especially its mud.

Thomas Harris MacDonald regarded road building as something more than a mere livelihood; it was a calling of higher moral purpose. “Next to the education of the child,” he wrote, road building ranked as “the greatest public responsibility.” It contributed to the common good and did more to increase the “possibilities of enjoyment and happiness of life than any other public undertaking.” Good roads could improve the living standards of all, but especially rural Americans. For decades, agrarian life had been on the decline as young men and women on farms, unable to tolerate their isolation, abandoned their parents’ land and succumbed to the lure of the city. It was only a matter of time before people living in cities would outnumber those living on farms. Surely, MacDonald and others believed naively, roads connecting the country with the city could reverse this decline. Not only would he pull farmers out of the mud, but with good roads he would connect those farms with the county seat, the state capital, and ultimately with other states and cities. Greater mobility would make rural life more attractive and help keep Iowa’s sons and daughters on the farm. Automobiles were beginning to appear in the state, and they, too, needed good roads if they were to travel beyond the limits of large cities. Isolated no longer, rural life would prosper.

MacDonald’s high ideals were sorely tested: Many of the men building roads in Iowa in 1904 were either fraudulent or ignorant. Throughout the state’s ninety-nine counties, private companies—often with the knowledge of county officials—conspired to rig their construction bids so that each would be guaranteed a portion of the contracts. While their collusion was merely unethical, their construction was dangerously incompetent: wooden bridges too weak to carry an automobile or a horse and wagon; bridge decking that left no room for expansion and contraction; wooden culverts without any reinforcement. Within a few months of completion, the structures invariably collapsed or broke apart and county officials and construction companies repeated the process.

Shortly after his appointment, MacDonald challenged the cozy relationship that bridge contractors and cement producers enjoyed with county officials. Traveling the state on horseback and by train, he demonstrated to county officials how to build culverts with concrete and bridges with steel, as well as the principles of road maintenance. He checked construction projects personally; often he uncovered serious structural flaws, and sometimes fraud. Many farmers and local officials did not know quite what to make of this formal and dispassionate young man who brought efficient management, scientific detachment, and an unassailable integrity to what they regarded as simply an easy and benign way to spread a little extra money about the state. But word spread quietly and quickly: Unlike others concerned with road building, MacDonald could not be bought. He exposed bid rigging in Clinton and Polk counties. County officials went to jail and companies had to reimburse counties for shoddy work. “There has never been a straighter man any place,” a writer for the Montezuma newspaper said in a fulsome tribute, “he has always stood to the fore…for protection of the taxpayer and that they get the worth of their money.”

More important than exposing fraud, MacDonald actually improved the roads in his state. Highway crews now graded the six thousand miles of road regularly. They stabilized the soil and spread gravel and stone on about two thousand miles, and they paved about five hundred miles with brick or portland concrete. Instead of rebuilding the same faulty wooden bridges and culverts again and again, engineers designed new structures of reinforced concrete. Modest though those improvements were by today’s standards, they represented a quantum leap for the time. Seeing the ways that better roads ended isolation, Iowans were happy to pay for them. As roads improved, state residents began to buy automobiles. By 1914, Iowans owned more automobiles per capita—one for every 5.5 persons—than citizens of any other state in the Union. Just a decade after MacDonald began, Iowa boasted a full-fledged highway commission with a staff of sixty-one and an annual budget of $ 15 million.

MacDonald was ready for a bigger challenge. It came in the spring of 1919, when David Houston, the Secretary of Agriculture under Woodrow Wilson, invited him to become chief of the Federal Bureau of Public Roads, successor to the Office of Road Inquiry, in Washington. MacDonald accepted after he held out for a salary of $6,000—$1,500 more than his predecessor received. That March, after the appointment was announced, the Des Moines Capital published an editorial about the commissioner. “Mr. MacDonald is a steady going man,” the writer said, who had to endure “all the unhappy features of Iowa road work.” Iowans had known he would be offered the job, “but hoped that he might not accept.” Still, the editorial continued, “in the larger field, he may accomplish more.”

The “larger field” was the United States of America—over three million miles of roads, of which just three hundred fifty thousand could be described as “surfaced.” As more and more people across the United States purcha...